Books: Uncle John's Bathroom Reader

More than a decade before the advent of Wikipedia, the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series brought encyclopedic trivia knowledge to the masses. Billed as the solution to "that last minute search for perfect reading material," the slightly tongue-in-cheek books brimmed with the kind of pop culture/science/history blend that currently addicts people to the World Wide Web. The series is still going strong, so I thought I'd reminisce about it a bit.

Like a lot of people, I like to read something when I'm in the bathroom. Whether it's a newspaper, a magazine, or a book, it's nice to have something to occupy your mind while you do your business. The problem comes, of course, when you don't have anything handy to read - maybe that poetry collection isn't lighting your fire, or you're bored of that magical realist novel.

Enter Uncle John. Each book contains hundreds of pages worth of short nonfiction articles and features - everything from humor and quotations to the story behind the atomic bomb. While there's a pretty thorough table of contents in the front, organizing things by subject, the articles themselves are put in random order, so that reading the book from page to page gives you a random assortment of topics that simulates browsing through webpages rather well.

I first picked up one of these books when they were just starting out, but now the "Bathroom Readers" have sold millions of copies. They're excellent to stow in the bathroom, of course, but they also make entertaining travel companions, whether on a plane or on a long road trip.